The territory now covered by Erving was settled about 1801, by Col.
Asaph White, of Heath, who built a log house in the wilderness.
A granite nothing, a name only, a scratched-up pile
of planet, tarped with old snow.
Every track it seemed
was days old, glassed by the sun and useless, though
there was no sun today.
Any movement
would have cracked something, a leaf, a pane of ice—thrown
out some flare,
some sound, but I heard
nothing.
My mind
was a gully of rock
sluiced with rock. It was a field of weeds overgrown now
with weeds. The deer
seemed simply to exist in another world.
I followed lines which came together
and split apart in trunks
and trails, I followed lines which were at every moment
the best way through the world. I begged
for notice, I paced the edge of a sea.
Dark piles under hemlocks
where snow was thin. Hoof-scrapes
for the infants of oak.
I sat on a fallen tree to take my meal of salt bread, unlacing
my boot to find the foot
that had been bothering the stone.
